Death, Decay, Discipline and Excess | The Scrivener

Welcome to The Scrivener! We’re starting the new year with a range of scholarly opportunities for you to pick from. From extended deadlines for previous CFPs (phew – there is still time!) to new conferences ranging from archival research, notions of discipline and excess, death and decay and vision and imagery. Read on to find out more!

The Imaginary4-5 March 2016Northeastern University English Graduate Student Association

The deadline for this conference has now been extended! Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to egsa.northeastern@gmail.com by 15 January 2016. Please include your name, department, and university affiliation. For more details see my post from 5 December.

The theme for the 114th Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference will be on ‘Archives, Libraries, Properties’.Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: books and book production and the transformation of the book; handwriting, the typewriter, and other ways to write; collective, corporate, and individual ownership and literary tradition; the book or the page as work of art; the curation of memory. Please send your name, affiliation, email, proposed session title, brief abstract (50 words), and a longer (150-200 word) proposal for your proposed session to Andrea Gogrof (Western Washington University) by the extended deadline of 15 January 2016.

Discipline and Excess
15 April 2016
University of Cambridge

This conference seeks to consider boundaries and their transgression until 1750. The theme invites diverse interpretations of “discipline”—moral, religious, cultural, aesthetic, generic, geographic—in papers which explore the realms of penance and perfection, challenge the orderliness implicit in systems of knowledge, or examine the nature of punishment and retribution.Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes. Please email 250-word abstracts (text only, no attachments) to disciplineandexcess2016@gmail.com by 1 February 2016. For more information visit their website.

Death, Thou Shalt Die—Decay and the Body in Early Modern England
18-20 August 2016
Bruges, Belgium

Hamlet’s ongoing existential crisis, visible in moments such as when as he considers whether “to be, or not to be” or when he clutches the skull of poor Yorick as he contemplates his own mortality, presents death as a corporeal binary—the body may be only living or dead, with no space in between. However, the reality of death, particularly in early modern England, was considerably messier.The Sixteenth Century Society Conference invites papers on the them of death, decay and the body. Abstracts of approximately 300 words should be submitted to Eileen Sperry by 1 February 2016.

What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England?
9-11 September 2016
Zurich

It has been argued that we live in a world saturated by visual images, that culture has undergone a ‘pictorial turn’. This premise has prompted researchers in the humanities and social sciences to theorise the visual image, documenting its function and status relative to other media, tracing the history of its power and the attempts to disempower it. If you’re interested, the deadline is 15 March 2016. Please send abstracts (c. 200-400 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) to a.bevan.zlatar@es.uzh.ch.

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Author Shani Bans

Shani Bans is an assistant editor at TSS and a PhD candidate at University College London. Her thesis, 'Optics in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries' - explores the relationship between optics and literature in early modern Europe, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her other interests include: the culture of dissection in early modern drama, representation of ugly women; early modern science, medicine and technology; the history of Shakespearean criticism; Sidney circle; Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne; Virginia Woolf; Hergé; Derrida and epistolarity.